Newell, Abrams announce plans for movie/game collaborations

Industry luminaries considering Half-Life, Portal movies.

At a DICE Summit conversation this morning, Valve cofounder Gabe Newell and TV and movie director J.J. Abrams announced plans to collaborate on future game and movie projects, including potential Portal and Half-Life movies.

Following a wide-ranging onstage talk reprising the kind of private discussions Newell says movie and TV people have all the time, he announced that it was "time to do more than talking."

Abrams jumped in to mention an "idea for a game that we'd like to work with Valve on."

Newell took the mic again, saying, "We're also interested in working with you guys on movies. We're going to see if we can make a Portal movie or a Half-Life movie."

The above announcement came after a good-natured talk about the different ways movies and games tell stories. Newell started things off by saying that the "implicit criticism games have been making about movies is that movies take away agency." He then played a clip from Cloverfield in which the protagonist continues to film with a handheld as the head of the Statue of Liberty lands mere feet from him. "I'm looking at that as a gamer and I'm saying 'put the camera down and let me fucking run,' and you won't let me do that."

As a counterpoint, Abrams pointed out a scene at the beginning of Half-Life 2. While two non-player characters are giving Gordon Freeman important story information, the player walks around and tinkers with things in the room like books and a tabletop teleportation machine. "You've got a story going on, and you have characters teleporting and throwing stuff and shit," Abrams accused. "Either way, they're the architects of their own amusement," Newell countered.

The entire 20-minute talk went on like that, with the pair good-naturedly pointing out the pros and cons of their respective media. Abrams pointed out scenes in Half-Life 2 where it didn't make sense for Gordon to stand there as a mute. Newell answered that the benefit is that people who talk about Half-Life 2 talk about things that happened to them, not Gordon.

The pair also talked quite a bit about what games and movies can learn from each other. Abrams showed an early Jaws scene that established the explosiveness of the compressed air on the boat, setting up the final scene where those canisters are a key plot point. Newell said games are learning from movies in that way, pointing out how the scene introducing Portal 2's potato battery (at a defunct science fair) seems like a throwaway gag at the time, but it ends up being a key plot point later on.

Newell also said that players get to control how much of the experience they want to take part in, encouraging multiple play-throughs. Abrams said that filmmakers do that themselves, hiding Easter Eggs that are only apparent on a second watch, sometime only with freeze-frame capability. He said that R2D2 is actually floating around in the debris of a battle in the recent Star Trek reboot, prompting Newell to joke that we should look through the movie for hints about Abrams' next unannounced project. "Oh look, there's Winnie the Pooh!"

Newell also talked about the movie-like idea of grabbing the player's focus to give them important information. *PORTAL 2 SPOILERS UNTIL THE END OF THE PARAGRAPH* For Portal 2, there was a lot of play-testing involved to make it so the final solution of shooting a portal at the moon was immediately obvious but also felt spontaneous and original.

Both creators also talked up the importance of making sympathetic characters before the action started. Abrams said that films like Die Hard and Back to the Future devote lots of time to just following the characters in their everyday lives before the more "memorable" bits happen. Newell added that the opening sequence to the original Half-Life similarly tried to give players an idea of Gordon Freeman's daily routine.

The friendly, adversarial tone of the talk showed that both Newell and Abrams have immense respect for each other but aren't afraid to challenge the other about things that just don't work. It has us pretty excited to see what they can create together.

Promoted Comments

Originally they wanted to do a soap opera: Days of Our Half-lives. But they ran into a problem when it was clear that the the third episode wouldn't be ready in time.

7180 posts | registered Jan 17, 2009

Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl

Presumably the digital versions will also be at least the same price as the boxed copies too.

If Steam is any indication the digital version will be A LOT more than a boxed copy, and if succesfull it'll never drop below $15.

EDIT: As for Abrams I haven't actually seen any of his movies. I like sci-fi and all but I have never been interested in them.

You speak like a man that has never seen a steam sale. Plenty of good games going for less than $15. They had Hitman: Absolution for 50% off in January. Game was just released in November. I'm not a rabid user of Cheap Ass Gamer so maybe I missed a sale, but I haven't heard of anyone else put the game on sale for that cheap by that time.

EDIT: Sorry. checked my receipt. It was 66% off. I paid $16.99 for it two months after it was released.

How much do you guys want to bet that Abrams hires the same miserable creature designer that he did for Star Trek, Super 8 and Cloverfield? LOL

Damned Neville Page. His industrial design stuff is OK and his tutorial dvds are good but his creatures sort of suck. The worst is that you can always tell when he designed the creatures across several movies.

Half-Life movie, with a well done script, following more or less the first game's story, would be awesome. Getting Bryan Cranston from breaking bad to play gordon freeman would be even more awesome.

I think hollywood is still scared a little bit from the likes of the super mario bros and doom movies, but some of these games are screaming for a good movie port. With fantasy becoming popular again (ala LOTR and the like) and CGI that much better than it used to be, it would be really nice to see a trilogy of something like the legend of zelda.

I think a half-life/portal movie could work if you make three movies out of it. First a Half-life movie then a Portal movie with the story lines of each intertwining and culminating in a third movie that brings the story lines together in a nice dove tail. I should mention that i have suspected that HL:3 would probably follow this same logic, mixing the Portal and Half-life storylines. Of course if they dont release HL:3 before the movie i would demand a boycot!

I'm going to call it now and say that Half-Life 3 is going to be a movie/game hybrid. Imagine a fully-realized movie that puts the viewer in the "driver's seat," so to speak, as much as a video game does. That would explain the development focus at Valve on the Source Filmmaker, and the ever-increasing complexity of the Team Fortress 2 "Meet the _____" videos. It would also explain the shroud over all things HL3; if they've been planning something like this from the start, it wouldn't make sense to comment on HL3's development/release status, what with the rapid pace at which the requisite technology has evolved. Any progress on the game wouldn't be finalized without the movie portion.

I know some folks here are rooting for Portal or Half-Life movies NOT to be made, and I can certainly understand the sentiment, especially after film versions of Doom, Hitman, Prince of Persia, Max Payne and every Uwe Boll adaptation.

But...I look at this as a matter of source material. Would I rather have a someone try to make a movie based on source material that I respect and value, or would I rather they made drab, unredeemable garbage based on original source material like Mission to Mars? Personally, I'd rather have the former. At least it may, given the source material, have a shot at being good, and the chances are even better if there are talented people behind it (I'd like to think a Peter Jackson-backed Halo film would be a lot better than the Resident Evil movies, for example).

And to me, it won't change how i feel about Half-Life or Portal. The games are still great.

You really want Abrams directing your sci-fi, after his work on "Star Trek"?

Enjoy halogen bulbs shining into the eyes of your audience throughout the film!

EDITed to add:

How much do you guys want to bet that Abrams hires the same miserable creature designer that he did for Star Trek, Super 8 and Cloverfield? LOL

Well, I liked the Star Trek reboot. And it's not like the lens-flares are "JJ Abrams"-style, but rather, "Star Trek reboot"-style. They wanted certain feel and atmosphere in the movie, and the flares were part of it. If you look at the other stuff he has done (Lost, Cloverfield etc.), there are no lens-flares there.

Presumably the digital versions will also be at least the same price as the boxed copies too.

If Steam is any indication the digital version will be A LOT more than a boxed copy, and if succesfull it'll never drop below $15.

EDIT: As for Abrams I haven't actually seen any of his movies. I like sci-fi and all but I have never been interested in them.

You speak like a man that has never seen a steam sale. Plenty of good games going for less than $15. They had Hitman: Absolution for 50% off in January. Game was just released in November. I'm not a rabid user of Cheap Ass Gamer so maybe I missed a sale, but I haven't heard of anyone else put the game on sale for that cheap by that time.

The funny thins is that those sales sometimes actually hit the same price you have to pay for a physical copy. Deus Ex: HR was at least €15 more at launch (and is now about twice as expensive as a physical copy), Borderlands 2 is almost twice as much as a physical version, Skyrim is comfortable at €10 more than a physical version, the first Deus Ex is three times as much as physical, the same goes for Dragon Age (three years later still €30), all Mass Effect games are considerbly more on Steam.. It goes on and on and on and on. They have sales though, but I can often find physical releases for the same money whenever I want.

And I live in Sweden btw, so no they are not pirated copies bought in back alleys. Is Steam good? Yes, it totally is, but it is NOT cheaper in any way.

No kidding. If they can get the game out and a movie within the same time period then cool, I don't care. If it means we don't get HL3 because they're focusing on the movie then I have a problem with it.

You really want Abrams directing your sci-fi, after his work on "Star Trek"?

Enjoy halogen bulbs shining into the eyes of your audience throughout the film!

EDITed to add:

How much do you guys want to bet that Abrams hires the same miserable creature designer that he did for Star Trek, Super 8 and Cloverfield? LOL

*shrugs*

I happened to like the last Star Trek movie.

Yeah, and what the hell was wrong with Super 8? That was a fantastic movie.

As much as I tend to disagree with Visi, he wasn't specifically saying that Super 8 and Cloverfield sucked (though he might feel as much), his comment was specifically about the creature design.

Look at the Cloverfield monster, then look at the Super 8 monster, and then finally look at the creatures on the ice planet in Star Trek... notice a similarity? This is one place I have to agree with him. In Cloverfield it was cool, but after the 3rd time seeing basically the same type of monster it's managed to get old really fast.

Presumably the digital versions will also be at least the same price as the boxed copies too.

If Steam is any indication the digital version will be A LOT more than a boxed copy, and if succesfull it'll never drop below $15.

EDIT: As for Abrams I haven't actually seen any of his movies. I like sci-fi and all but I have never been interested in them.

You speak like a man that has never seen a steam sale. Plenty of good games going for less than $15. They had Hitman: Absolution for 50% off in January. Game was just released in November. I'm not a rabid user of Cheap Ass Gamer so maybe I missed a sale, but I haven't heard of anyone else put the game on sale for that cheap by that time.

I've seen Steam sales. That's why I made my comment.Steam sales sometimes bring prices down to physical copy level in my country. More often than not they are still more expensive.